It has become a truism to say that Samuel Moyn’s work landed like “a grenade” amid common understandings of postwar history. In numerous influential publications, he claims that the post-World War II popularity of “human rights” was not due to the advocacy of enlightened (Kantian) philosophers, liberal democrats, or progressive New Dealers, as many had long believed. Rather, it was reactionary European Catholics who elevated human rights as the buzzword of the era, part of their successful effort to build a conservative, anti-communist, and spiritually intolerant Western bloc. Moreover, Moyn provocatively maintains that Catholics, who spent the 1930s assiduously combating the notion of individual rights and assailing democratic regimes in Austria, Germany, France, and elsewhere, did not embrace human rights out of a heroic change of heart or a recognition of democracy’s intrinsic values. Their flimsy support of these principles stemmed from the conviction that human rights could be mobilized in their decades-long crusade against communism, individualism, and gender equality. Moyn therefore casts a harsh light on Europe’s postwar reconstruction and the era’s human rights renaissance as a whole. The architects of both, so it turns out, were actually the gravediggers of liberalism and equality.
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Border-crossers, the human person, and Catholic communitarianism
by Piotr H. KosickiIt is a delight to be asked to contribute to this forum on Samuel Moyn’s work on Christianity and human rights. Since my first year of graduate school, Moyn has had a strong influence on how I understand Roman Catholic thought in the twentieth century. “Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights” first came to my attention when Sam shared it with me in draft form in 2009, and it was this text more than any other that convinced me that any explanation of post-1945 shifts in Catholic thought and activism must begin with the 1930s, if not indeed earlier. I therefore thank both Samuel Moyn and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins of The Immanent Frame for including me in this forum. Because I work on Poland as well as Western Europe and on Catholic socialists as well as Christian Democrats, I often find myself sitting in workshops on transnational Christianity suppressing the impulse to step into the role of token shrill voice in the room insisting, “What about Eastern Europe?! What about the socialists and the Communists?! Western European Christian Democracy is only part of the twentieth-century story of Catholicism in Europe—let alone of global Christianity writ large!”
An unwanted legacy: Christianity and the future of human rights
by Or RosenboimThe conceptual history of human rights has received a great deal of scholarly attention over the last decade. Many of the contributions sought to complicate the banal historical narrative that human rights emerged after the Second World War as a universal, liberal answer to the horrors of the Holocaust and totalitarianism. Some historians (including Marco Duranti, Marc Mazower and, of course, Samuel Moyn) have discredited this account as triumphalist and simplistic, or even plainly wrong. However, the intellectual ground from which the idea of human rights stemmed has not yet been fully charted. In his forthcoming book, Christian Human Rights, Samuel Moyn makes an important contribution towards clarifying the genealogy of human rights in the twentieth century. He argues that it was the Christian—and more specifically—Catholic notion of “personalism” that provided the conceptual foundation for modern “human rights,” and identified the crucial era of its development in the late 1930s and early 1940s. This historical narrative embodies also a significant political point: liberals should beware of celebrating human rights as a liberal achievement because they are in fact imbued with conservative, Christian ideology. Nonetheless, he adds, by discovering the legacy of Christianity in the history of human rights, we can “transcend its least persuasive aspects.”
Christian human rights and the Jews
by Paul HanebrinkWhat did Christian human rights mean for Jews? This is not a question that Samuel Moyn considers in any great detail in these essays. In his framing piece, he advises us to read Pope Pius XII’s 1942 Christmas address for what the pontiff said, not for what he did not. Christian human rights were not conceived with Jews in mind, nor did many Christians in wartime Europe believe they applied to the plight of European Jews, apart, perhaps, from converts. Moyn convincingly argues that Christian human rights were the creation of conservative Christians (mainly Catholic in his telling, but with important participation by Protestants) who adapted their beliefs in the dignity of the human person and the core right to religious freedom to a transformed political landscape. In the process, they found that liberal democracy could be an ally, not an enemy, in their fight against secularism, materialism, and, above all, communism. Christian human rights, he concludes, had far less to do with the “inclusion of the other” than it did with “policing the border and boundaries at which threatening enemies” loomed.
From personalism to liberalism?
by Carlo Invernizzi AccettiIn his paper “Personalism, Community and the Origins of Human Rights,” Samuel Moyn argues that a relatively understudied current of Catholic political thought—known as personalism—played a key role in the affirmation of human rights as today’s dominant ideological framework. This may initially appear surprising given the well-known opposition of traditional Catholic social doctrine to the values normally associated with liberalism, modernity and the French Revolution. However, Moyn’s argument is that Catholic political thought underwent a transformation in the middle part of the twentieth century, developing a distinctive doctrine of human rights on the basis of a concept of the human “person,” which turned out to be crucial for the inscription of human rights within the juridical and political framework of the post-war order. Indeed, Moyn argues that this Catholic rediscovery of human rights took place at a time (the early 1940s) during which other, more progressive, intellectual and political currents were relatively uninterested in them. Thus, he provocatively suggests that the widespread prestige this notion enjoys today has its roots in an essentially “conservative” political project of the mid-twentieth century.
On the recognition of human rights
by Nicholas WolterstorffSamuel Moyn's essay, "Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights," makes an important contribution to our understanding of the history of the concept of human rights. I am a philosopher. Though I have a considerable interest in history, I am not a historian. Before reading Moyn's essay I knew nothing about the developments that he discusses. Discovering the depths of my ignorance might have left me feeling embarrassed and chagrined but for the fact that, as Moyn observes, almost none of his fellow active historians knew anything about these developments either.